Override draw distance?

[TimtheEnchanter]

Is it possible there's a parameter that allows this to globally change the range at which certain objects render? In large scenes, it's kind of ridiculous that the "player" needs to be in such a close proximity to some things in order for them to show up.

[Codewalker]

You can drop down the console (backtick or tilde key) and type visscale 8.

The default visscale is 1.  visscale 2 is equivalent to setting "world detail" to 200% in your graphics options. 4 is 400% and so on. It basically increases the draw distance (as well as LOD model switch ranges) of everything using visscale as a multiplier. Of course cranking it way up will reduce your framerate considerably. Not an issue if you're rendering a video with a fixed -demofps, but might be for interactive playback.

You *might* be able to specify it on the command line as -visscale 8. I haven't tried it so I don't know if it works.

[TimtheEnchanter]

That seems to work for the static map, but not for NPC models.

[Zombie Man]

You can drop down the console (backtick or tilde key) and type visscale 8.

The default visscale is 1.  visscale 2 is equivalent to setting "world detail" to 200% in your graphics options. 4 is 400% and so on. It basically increases the draw distance (as well as LOD model switch ranges) of everything using visscale as a multiplier. Of course cranking it way up will reduce your framerate considerably. Not an issue if you're rendering a video with a fixed -demofps, but might be for interactive playback.

You *might* be able to specify it on the command line as -visscale 8. I haven't tried it so I don't know if it works.

Whoa. When did the game allow Visscale to go past 400%?

[Arachnion]

Whoa. When did the game allow Visscale to go past 400%?

Might be a developer hack/flag.

 

[Codewalker]

Oh yeah, my bad, it won't let you set visscale higher than 4 (or less than 0.5, weird) unless you have an elevated accesslevel. 

[TimtheEnchanter]

Heh, my bad too. I guess draw distance wasn't specific enough. This is something that the game does to determine if an NPC model should be visible relative to the location of the 'player' object. This happens completely independent of the camera's location and greatly limits what objects are shown. A few things though will appear almost any distance from the player, such as Rikti dropships. Changing the visscale doesn't influence this.

[Codewalker]

Yes, whether an entity is drawn is based on the distance from the player. Various entity types can override that distance, which is why some show up farther away than others. There's actually two distances, a "start fading out" distance, and a "no longer seen" distance.

I don't see a simple slash command or anything to override that -- it appears to be a hardcoded behavior. Modding the client to override it looks doable, if you're comfortable making a few changes to the exe.

[TimtheEnchanter]

I've got 2 different versions of the client exe in my CoH folder already with altered hex codes. Another one won't hurt anything.